Warner Bros. and DC spent much of 2016 and 2017 desperately trying to catch up with Marvel Studios. They were obviously looking for their own version of The Avengers and the MCU and tried to rush it without doing the necessary set-up and then got cold feet on what they saw of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. Both were taken out of the hands of the original directors and drastically altered before release, to the consternation of fans who believed they’d gotten a lesser version of both films.
Yesterday, news broke that Justice League is finally going to be completed and released on HBO Max in 2021, and soon after, Ayer tweeted an animated image of Jared Leto’s Joker.
— David Ayer (@DavidAyerMovies) May 20, 2020
It’s worth remembering that Ayer had an extremely miserable time on Suicide Squad. The story goes that Warner Bros. executives were so impressed by the first trailer for the movie (which Ayer didn’t make) that they decided that they wanted the pic to be more like it. This necessitated a lot of reshoots and, though it’s difficult to find confirmation on this, Warner Bros. may have even given final cut on the film to the marketing company that made the trailer.
Ayer later explained that the finished movie is “vastly different from [its] original assembly” and that Harley Quinn’s story arc was “vastly simplified.” In addition, Ayer also criticized the way that major studios treat their directing talent, claiming “[most directors] are treated as figureheads and actually have very little say over the final product. We just don’t talk about it.”
Thing is, we’ve already seen an “extended cut” of Suicide Squad, which added 13 minutes of footage, though this is acknowledged to still be far from the version Ayer intended. Suicide Squad wasn’t exactly a Justice League level disaster (it made a bunch of money and won an Oscar), but there’s still the sense that we haven’t seen the best version of the movie.
Though the release of a Suicide Squad Ayer Cut once seemed unlikely, there’ve now been whispers that it could happen and in a world where Zack Snyder is being given $30 million to finish his Justice League, all bets are off. In the meantime, we have James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad coming next summer. Fingers crossed production is a little smoother this time around.